Tag Archives: personality

Do personal partners who act, react, and interact through the same M.O.* miss out on the synergy of conative differences?

Do conative look alikes compete or try to one-up each other (“My facts are more thorough than your facts,” or “You couldn’t possibly improve on the way I’ve organized the pots and pans.”)?

Do Same M.O. Marriages become so same-o’, same-o’ that their twosomeness excludes others?

Yes – for all of the above questions.

Yet, Same M.O. Marriages not only survive – they thrive.
That’s because personal relationships are about more than conative M.O.s.

Effect of Affect

Toss in different interests, and two people insistent in Fact Finder can bring tons of different kinds of information into the equation.

Watch how an introvert gets an extrovert to dial it down. Or the extrovert opens up their social life.

Both may take risks, but if one person in a Same M.O. Marriage has an emotional need for financial security, even with a pair of insist Quick starts, it will put the brakes on their betting the ranch.

Another effect of affect happens when partners do not have shared values. If only one wants a family, or to protect the environment, or march for a particular cause, it becomes a far bigger reason for marital problems than either a similarity or difference in M.O.s.

Cognitive Impact

It was totally weird for me to have my college boyfriends take my Dad’s Wonderlic Personnel test, but it certainly was fascinating to be able to confirm their cognitive abilities. It’s weirder for girls to play dumb in order to get a guy.

I would be willing to bet that couples similarly matched by IQ is predictive of marital sustainability. If both people have the same M.O. to gather specific details, but one’s information is full of errors… it just doesn’t add up to a positive picture for the long-run.

Having different skills, training, and types of education can enhance any relationship, especially one when partner has to do the problem-solving involved in building a nest and raising kids. Sans kids, it still works for vacation planning.

Dynamynd® Levels of Effort

No matter how snuggly matched or unmatched a marriage is by M.O., the greater menace is unmatched levels of effort.

No matter how conforming or non-conforming a couple is by M.O., the greatest savior under stress is a matched level of effort.

I coined the word Dynamynd when it became clear to me that how we deal with our mental assets is not just about the three parts of the mind, but how we leverage them through our levels of effort. If only one partner does all the heavy lifting in a relationship — whether by simplifying the issues, stabilizing the finances, or arranging all the plans – it just won’t work in the long haul.

Relationship apps?

Countless business partnership offers have been made to me, based on my agreeing to use my work for matching people as marriage partners.

Sure, I’ll do it, when we can figure out how to factor in all of the other considerations.

* M.O. refers to an individual’s Modus Operandi and consists of a numerical representation of one’s instinctive way of taking action as measured across the four Kolbe Action Modes®.

How could they be my friends and spend a lovely Sunday evening (while they could have been watching a magnificent sunset change from vibrant colors to muted tones) talking about how they were dreading going to work the next day. Both very intelligent, well-paid professionals were planning for their Monday Morning Blues.

“Why don’t you find jobs that you would love to do?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“It’s not that I don’t like my job, I would just prefer not to work,” one said.

“My job is filled with joy,” I said, realizing this would ruin their fun in complaining about their jobs, and make me an outsider. “Monday mornings are great, because I get to dive in to what I love doing.”

“You are not normal,” said the second, with a tone close to disgust, “I have to work at my stressful job until I can get my full retirement, because we want to be able to do lots of traveling when I’m done with it.”

“You’re your own boss, Kathy, so you don’t know what it’s like to have to work at a job where you have to do what others decide you should be doing,” said the other person.

“Yes, I created a work situation that gives me the freedom to be myself,” I said, “which, by the way, doesn’t give me retirement benefits. I’ll never retire. I look forward to working at doing something that I love doing for the rest of my life. I’m not waiting to have freedom, I have freedom.”

Eyes rolled and they both ordered another drink.

“You are not normal,” they said, in unison this time – with shared disgust in both their voices. “Part of the fun of Happy Hour is complaining about your job. Stop being a party pooper.”

Being gifted cognitively does not make you smart. Nor does it give you instinctive problem solving abilities, a better personality or a greater work ethic than others.

“Gifted” is a dumb label for high intelligence. It is a “gift’ that comes with no instructions, and is often like the proverbial “White Elephant.” It can be hard to figure out how to use it.

Being gifted adds to your workload

People with higher IQs often find it hard to use normal solutions.

If you have a high IQ this means:

You have to work hard to figure out how to get along with the majority of people who don’t “get it” as fast as you do.If you don’t overcome this problem, you will be a terrible teacher/trainer/boss/roommate/team-member/next-door-neighbor.

You have to discover how and why you learn differently, because most teachers will not challenge you sufficiently.If you don’t figure out that you have to be self-motivated, you’ll simply learn to regurgitate facts and not fulfill your potential as an excellent creative problem solver.

You have to work very hard to communicate the ideas in your head in ways that work for most others.If you don’t make this happen, you will be frustrated by others not listening to you, or joining you in developing solutions you know are possible.

You have to work hard, some times to avoid the bad behaviors that stem from boredom.If you don’t self-manage your mind, you will attract attention to yourself for all the wrong reasons.

“Over-achieving” is impossible. “Under-achieving” is a betrayal of possibilities.

Those who have a “gifted” mind do not have the option of re-gifting it. They have the responsibility of using it for good purposes.

Advantages of High Intelligence

Three characteristics, which could be used to define the unique nature of high intelligence are:

It’s because they have the first two abilities that gifted people CAN manipulate – for good or for not-so-good. They can to choose how and when to use this attribute.

When someone seems to “know” how you feel, it can be a sign of high IQ. However, do not confuse this with Caring about how you feel, which is, of course, in the affective domain rather than the cognitive.

Those who anticipate a movement in the stock market, or of a bear in the woods, or what will make a tree crash to the ground – are all showing higher degrees of IQ. Whether they act on it is an affective issue. How they act on it depends upon their conative instincts.

Being Gifted is Never the Whole Story

I was told as a child that I was highly gifted – in everything but math. Math turned out to be one of my greatest strengths as a theorist and entrepreneur. The terms “severely dyslexic and dysgraphic” weren’t used yet, so my weird way of reading and writing made some people think I wasn’t trying hard enough. It always took effort to “show them!” that my weird ways worked. It also took effort to prove that a severely gifted girl (born in the late 1930’s) didn’t have to play dumb. Most of all, it has required tons of effort to prove that a highly dyslexic person could play smart.

Effort is as essential for a gifted person as it is for any other person. This is understated in most literature on gifted education. Although I have been a university Adjunct Professor of Gifted Education, published “Resources for the Gifted,” and run programs for gifted youngsters, no amount of reading or discussion among experts in the field ever taught me as much on this subject as my observations and discussion with four generations of gifted family members. There is not a single one among them who has not had to work very hard to overcome challenges and discover their nitch in the world.

It is through interactions with gifted grandchildren, that I believe I have completed my home work. I finally consider myself a bona fide authority on the subject of Being Gifted.

This is the poem that inspires a comment I frequently make: Nothing IS Everything.

Know you what it is to be a child?…it is to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in our ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its soul.

Francis Thompson

I wrote a children’s book titled: Nothing Doings: There’s Nothing to It!, published in 1985.

With a few updates it reads as follows:

I am Nothing.
There’s Nothing like being Nothing.
There’s Nothing to it.

Nothing’s wrong with being Nothing.

There’s Nothing quite so popular as being Nothing ‘cause …
Everyone wants something for Nothing.

You often hear folks say, “Thanks for Nothing,”
And answer, “Think Nothing of it.”

With me, it’s Nothing ventured, Nothing gained.

I don’t think of myself as a mere Nothing…
I’m ALL or Nothing
‘cause I’ve got plenty of Nothing,
And Nothing’s plenty for me.

Nothing’s more fun than Anything.
You ain’t seen Nothing yet.

Nothing is possible.

Nothing is everywhere. There’s eitherNothing to wear…Nothing to eat…Nothing to do

Nothing succeeds like success

You’re wise to say “NOTHING!”
…Nothing but the truth.

I figure I’m pretty entertaining…
Because I often hear there’s Nothing to laugh about.
When I’m in an otherwise boring show, there’s Nothing to cheer about,
Even when it’s awful, Nothing would be better.

When I hide, there’s Nothing to seek.
When I surprise you, there’s Nothing more intriguing.

One thing for sure about me: Nothing is certain.

I’m original because Nothing is new under the sun.
There’s Nothing like me.
When people use me in a wrong way, the Nothing they put into a project…
Leads to Nothing coming out of it.

I’m tops when it comes to productivity because…Nothing can be created from Nothing,
And Nothing in Particular
Turns Nothing into Everything

You have an equal opportunity (or as one recent job candidate wrote in the first line of his resume: “an opertunity”) …to destroy your chances of getting called in for a job interview.

Simple 1st step for getting out of a job interview is what 80% of on-line job applicants are doing: send blah, or blah that should have been spell-checked and proofread.

Step 2: Show laziness + ignorance by either not including a cover letter, or (even better – for your purpose) sending a one-size-fits-all cover letter that doesn’t even mention what the company does or what the job requires.

When you don’t take time to individualize your application for a specific role at a particular company, you won’t need to worry about a quality company taking your time for a job interview. They’ll immediately put you where you seemed to ask to be put – in the Not Interested pile.

Step 3: If you’re still in danger of having to be interviewed, your next line of defense requires going beyond canned blah. You may need the help of an overused, senseless expert in bad blah, like the book, What Color Is Your Parachute. By using all of its meaningless “key” words, you have a recipe for avoiding the disclosure of any spark of your own creativity or insight. This me-too approach will keep companies from expecting too much from you.

Step 4: You shouldn’t have to put this much effort into not being selected for interviews, but this just-in-case step improves your odds of not being interviewed because it insults the intelligence of whomever makes those recommendations. Be sure you take this step to extremes. Unfortunately for you, many others seem to be catching on to this trick. You’ll have to one-up what is being said by all the other wannabe losers.

Use highly unbelievable statements about how much you have done in so little time (“I worked for a very high status company for 6 months, and during that time I increased corporate revenues by 28%). Or how you saved an entire company from disaster by your discovery of all of their mistakes (“Reviewed and redesigned corporate strategic plan and established a workable system that impacted the productivity of all departments.”) Or how just little “newbie-you” outsmarted the corporate culture (“I introduced the company to the world of social media and got thousands of on-line followers to chat with us.”).

Step 5: Not sure you can sound more boastful than so many others? This last step is what some have used as the dagger in the heart of an almost-ready-to-interview-you situation. You may even find it fun: Complain about the potential employer’s hiring process.

There may be an employee who will give you credit for being outspoken (or agree with you that their company is not doing a good job) so be sure when you use this technique that you call the company owner or CEO on his or her personal cell phone. Here’s a sample script that is pretty sure to get you out of the interview:

“I don’t know why you think anyone would want to work for your company. I shouldn’t have to show you examples of my private, personally done work, or spend my free time reading your website, or put up with you snooping around my Facebook stuff. And, I shouldn’t have to fill out that stupid Kolbe Index.”

It feels like there is mostly Thinking going on in many academic programs, from fourth grade through undergraduate programs in universities. Where does the Doing get done? Not in lecture-based classrooms.

How inappropriate that parents, not teachers, often end up helping kids DO their homework – where most of the learning actually gets done.

Ask undergrads what they are Doing at school, and they usually tell you about what they are Doing in their “free” time or extra-curricular activities. Ask what they are doing in class, and the answer is probably, “Nothing but sitting and listening.”

Decades of research shows that learning happens by Doing. It’s called Active Learning in today’s literature. The proper term for the Doing domain of the mind is Conation.

Every field of study deals with conation. Yet, a century of perseverating about cognitive Thinking has led to contemporary blindness of the pervasiveness of conative Doing.

Marketing textbooks, when discussing the fallacy of focus groups asking for opinions (Thinking), point out that they are not a good predictor of what people will Do in the actual purchasing process.

Law school texts warn of the need to distinguish the difference between Thinking about and actually Doing (or committing) a crime.

Religion and philosophy courses deal with the difference between Thinking in moral ways and actually Doing moral or immoral acts.

Language classes teach the difference between passive verbs (Thinking) and active verbs (Doing) – the latter even known as conative verbs in some languages.

Engineering programs tackle issues of sustainability – this does not mean keeping a level of Thinking, but rather sustaining levels of energy or Doing.

Medical and health related programs cope with issues related to getting patients to Do what they need to Do, not just Think about what they need to Do. The term coming into greater use is now referred to as the patient being Active, as opposed to the former negative labeling of patients as Non-compliant.

Name a field of study and there will be issues dealing with the differences between Thinking and Doing. Doing will always be the key to breakthroughs, innovation, discoveries – or any other word synonymous with Success.

They learn:Who is best at making goalsWhat it takes to defend against others who make goalsWhere to position themselves for making goalsWhen to shoot for a goalHow to use soccer skills to score goals

It’s easy to make the Who/What/Where/When/How list regarding goals of almost any kind.

Who on the sales team is most consistent in reaching sales goals?What will get a lot of good PR?Where can you find the best new team members?When is a right time to buy new equipment?How is it possible to save enough money?

What’s missing is the WHY

Why is it valuable for kids to play sports like soccer?Why is good PR an important goal?Why are new team members a necessary goal?

For all of the other W’s, there is always a Why.
In the Why, you will find the Purpose.

As a journalism student at Northwestern,
I was taught to always include the 5W/s and the H in a news story.
The Why often became clear only when I wrote the headline
–or at least contemplated Why the story mattered.

Kids Prove Teamwork PaysPR Leads to an Increased Number of Job ApplicantsNew Employees Add to Team Synergy

Goals, like Deadlines, focus our conative energy.
They help us fulfill our Purposes.